Name: Jens Thomas
Nationality: German
Occupation: Vocalist, pianist, composer, improviser
Current release: Jens Thomas's book ZUHÖREN! [Listening!] is out via ATHENA, currently only in German. Also available is his album Neil Young Collage, out on o-tone.
Related book recommendations: Nada Brama: The World is Sound by Joachim Ernst Behrend; Silence by Erling Kagge; Sesame Street: The Martians Discover a Telephone, and The Martians Discover Radio.

If you enjoyed this Jens Thomas interview and would like to find out more about his work, visit his official homepage.



We all start as listeners to others – not just as artists, but as human beings. Why do you think we lose that capacity at some point and mainly try to make others listen to US?

Possibly as children we are still very close to oneness, in self-evident connection with the whole. So we do not feel much difference between "I" and "you". Our world in the womb of the mother is sound and who knows what else. In any case it is beyond seeing, beyond separation and distinction. When the child's "I" awakens, the desire for recognition grows.

Later, as an adult, the more traumatised the person is, the more he feels separated from the whole, the more he seeks resonance in the outside world, because this confirms his existence. When people listen to me, I have to be alive. I feel alive, I am important, I am worth something.

Fear of death is probably the main cause of our social deafness. And in the digital age, with the infinite self-expression possibilities on the internet, the addiction to be heard is fed even more, coupled with a numbing permanent sensory overload.

Listening to someone or something requires inner peace, but our unleashed capitalism can use anything but people who rest in themselves and contemplate the pure beauty of the world with open ears.

Your book offers a very interesting personal account of learning to play an instrument by looking and listening rather than verbal instruction. Why is verbal language words, otherwise perhaps humanity's greatest invention, so problematic when it comes to listening and performing?

Perhaps language immediately stimulates our thinking, which consists of words. And thinking distinguishes, evaluates, classifies. Under unfavourable circumstances, hurdles are unconsciously erected, learning becomes difficult and we don't know why.

Words trigger stress through memories, block us through the desire to do something "right". Words want to be understood. But the mind is not a good partner while listening and playing, only afterwards in retrospect and reflection.

Looking at how a musical movement looks offers direct access to our own body's feelings. Listening without analytical understanding inspires our imagination, our intuition. The vague leaves room for our own.

It is the simple "imitation" that makes it easier for us to absorb new things. And then the famous mirror neurons come into play more uninhibitedly.

It is fairly easy to understand the relationship between singing and breath, and even between breath and space. What, however, is the importance of breath when it comes to listening?

If I listen to my breath, I realise what I feel. Then I feel (again) what is actually going on. And that is usually enough to let my breath flow again. Listening to myself then means giving myself breathing space, being able to breathe again.

A flowing breath sharpens the senses and is an indication of relaxation. Whenever I remember to listen, the breath deepens. I become calmer inside when I listen and this influences the breath. At the same time, consciously listening to a deep breath in the belly is also an act of listening.

Consciously noticing one's own breath is a decision to listen to oneself. And when the breath is perceived, I am here and now: in the present.

One of the chapters in your book deals with the widespread phenomenon of constant rating of the quality of sound or music. I felt like you gave a good portrayal of what can be gained by reducing our inner need to rate incoming input. At the same time, rating is a deeply human trait and helps us make sense of our surrounding. What, from your point of view, is a healthy balance between the two?

In order to give meaning to our surroundings, I believe that it is not evaluation that is needed, but contact.

Contact makes closeness possible. The environment, in fact everything that exists, reveals itself to us in depth, but also in a very practical way, through our ability to let something and someone get close to us. Through contact, exchange becomes possible, we communicate and exchange information, we touch and let ourselves be touched.

This communication creates coherence and cognition, whereas evaluation causes distance and separation and thus makes it difficult to recognise meaning. Meaning for me is not about whether I like something, but about recognising what I can learn from an event.

Evaluation does not help me, but closeness to what is, even though it may be painful, does. Evaluation keeps me at a distance to escape the pain but also the bliss.

One of the highlights of the book, for me, was a scene from a free jazz gig you played many years ago. In that scene, none of the musicians was truly listening to each other – until you forced them to start doing so by suddenly playing a string of lovely major chords. Vice versa, I've witnessed concerts were one of the performers decided that listening was more important than playing, not producing a single sound during the entire concert. I know it sounds like a rating question, but what do you make of that?

I actually played the major chords as a young musician as an act of resistance. It was a jam session of people who had never played together before. I wanted to know if what I suspected was true: that free jazz was anything but free. Because there were unwritten rules there, too.

And of course it's a quite elegant form of contact not to play at all and just to listen. I had done that for a while before the major chords. Nobody took any notice of it. In my opinion at the time, the only thing that helped was provocation through harmony. Otherwise, when listening becomes pure observing, it doesn't necessarily lead to an exchange.

But every situation is incomparable, there is no recipe. Only the moment decides and being awake to that is important to me. In my current collaboration with the actor Matthias Brandt, for example, there are long phases of both of us not playing or not talking.

In this respect, I don't prefer anything in particular: I just have a deep desire to communicate with my stage partners and I want them to do the same, in whatever way they want.

You state that “to be able to improvise, you need to be able to forget.” I would agree, but at the same time, if we're improvising and are building some kind of narrative, we also “need to be able to remember” that theme to change it. In situations which feel right to you as a listener and performer, how do these two poles reconsile?

I found forgetting important especially at the beginning of my career. After concerts that I considered "good", I put myself under pressure to do it "good" again the next time, just as good as the last time. I always tried to solve the riddle, to find the key that would enable me to perform with freedom. That only worked after many years, when I realised that there was nothing to unravel.

In the end, I can only influence the quality of a concert to a very limited extent. "That's the way it is today," I thought at some point. "That's the meaning of it." I don't understand the meaning, but that's not necessary. This attitude freed me inwardly from the pressure to improvise something original, structured, etc.

In fact, I have a very poor musical memory, I always remember melodies only approximately, never exactly. At some point I recognised this limitation of my abilities as a treasure. Or reinterpreted it in this way.

You define improvisation as “just doing it.” Still, some kind of communication takes place between musicians, albeit often without words. How does this process work – and how does it change your performance compared to a solo performance?

“Just doing it“ means to me nothing else but being in exchange with each other. Just play. Meeting each other and there it goes. That is totally exciting for me.

Communication is always there on an infinite number of levels. Regardless of whether I'm playing with a pop band in which the songs are clearly structured, whether I'm working with actors or improvising with jazz musicians, wherever you're able to let things happen without a lot of talk, explanations or discussions, the focus is on the action itself, on the music itself, on playing together. In the acceptance of the respective situation, this freedom of "just doing" blossoms.

In a solo performance, the same thing happens to me with the audience and the space. It's hard to put into words, everything happens at the same time, listening and playing are the same.

When you're improvising, does it really feel like you're inventing everything on the spot – or isn't there at least an element of inventively re-arranging patterns from preparations, practise or previous performances? Or even from non-musical conversations?

I don't invent anything. I only make visible or audible what is there. In the room, in the audience, in me. It is a sifting out of infinitely diverse information, energies and possibilities that present themselves. All coloured and fed by the material and the activities you have described.

And sometimes things come that I can't relate to at all. Everything happens incredibly fast. Inconceivable and incomprehensible.

You mention that you see real, unpremeditated listening as an extension of the childlike desire to play. Can you expand on that a bit?

To give up searching for the meaning or significance of what sounds or what you are doing, not to question it, that's what I mean.

Children's play sometimes has an overwhelming logic or intelligence that we rational adults don't understand at all. I have experienced this with my grandson. He fantasises things in play that are sometimes an incredibly creative, humorous "performance" in which things from his everyday life, his emotional world, are processed.

Children are the greatest improvisers. They just do it and if you listen carefully, they tell stories about the interrelationships of life and living together that are so clever that it is impossible to grasp. Children instinctively understand everything. And because they don't think about it, it comes up again in their play.

About a year and a half ago, my then barely two-year-old grandson answered his mother's rhetorical question about who was coming to visit today (grandma and grandpa had been announced): "Putin."

I just conducted an interview with Zeitblom and many of his views are remarkably close to what you're describing in your book – but from a slightly different perspective. One statement about his creed as an artist was particularly pertinent to me: “The sounds should stand for themselves, without referring to anything or depicting anything other than themselves.” What's your take on that?

Yes, I think so too. Very beautifully expressed by Zeitblom.

Perhaps this is what gives sounds the possibility of touching people in the first place. Because the notes are free, without having a specific intention in them. Then the listeners can work with them wonderfully.

There are many chapters in the book which deal with topics which many would only vaguely associate with listening – politics, for example. I found these particularly intriguing. If we construct our world view through language and language is thought made sound, then we literally construct our reality through listening. I'd be curious as to how we can raise awareness of these thoughts and how society as a whole can deal with them “for the greater good”?

I am thinking specifically, for example in Germany, of the now increasingly established “Bürgerräte“ (citizens’ councils), in which people from the most diverse milieus and political corners meet. I have been told that participants were very positively surprised and touched by the fact that simply by talking and listening to each other, inhibitions and prejudices could be dissolved.

When these citizens, who meet by lottery, look for solutions to social and political issues, they will come up with better solutions, I believe, especially since they do not have to decide as elected politicians with an eye on the next election, but can really listen to what proves to be coherent.

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. You describe similar experiences in your book, notably upon listening to a Neil Young song. I understand that emotions and logic are not directly related, but find most of emotional responses easier to explain. What is at work here, do you feel?

I really don`t know what is at work. This is the big secret. Thank god nobody will ever know.